Critical Essay by Ina Ferris

In the following essay, Ferris observes that the publication of Waverley in 1814 prompted a critical reevaluation of the novel by associating the genre with seriousness, rationality, and the accurate depiction of history and culture.

When Henry Brougham reviewed The History of the Maroons in the Edinburgh Review in 1803, he emphasized its incompetence as a history by linking it generically to the novel: “The style is thoroughly wretched, and the composition is precisely that of a novel.”1 Writing in the same review a quarter of a century later, Thomas Babington Macaulay also linked the genres of history and the novel—but to a very different end. Contemporary historians, Macaulay declares in a well-known passage...